Strategy Based On Transmigration

The report’s source text is the speech text on I Ching translation delivered by the eminent British sinologist and translator John Minford in Shanghai,2016.His speech,The Reception in the West of the I Ching,or Book of Change,contains three main parts: his experience of learning Chinese culture,his consideration of whether to translate the Oracle or the Book of Wisdom,and a review of western studies on I Ching.Based on the features of the text,the translation follows the general ideas of Transmigration,a contemporary translation theory proposed by Qian Zhongshu,the distinguished Chinese philosopher,writer and translator.Simply put,Transmigration considers two aspects: one is readability,which requires translation to get rid of translationese and to be smooth to read;the other is loyalty,which means translation need to seal all elements of the ST within it.The theory is deemed the ultimate in translation by many Chinese scholars,and this report,based on the theory’s requirements,aims to develop a translation strategy for practice.As to readability,the strategy stresses that with a good understanding of the ST,translators should free themselves from the text’s restrictions which mainly imposed by its punctuation,sentence sequence,and sentence structure.And the method for translators is to think light of these three aspects and organize their own language while being concise.In this way can a translation avoid translationese as much as possible,and obtain clearness.This is also what Transmigration requires on readability.In respect of loyalty,the strategy looks into equivalence replacement of emphasis and image in translation,both of which always carry the emotion and content of the source text.To be specific,translation should emphasize the same thing to the same extent as the ST does,and reflect the images that the ST creates.As such,translation can be more faithful,or retaining the ST’s elements with the rare loss.In brief,the report through the application of transmigration,hopes to provide some inspirations to English-Chinese translation.